Dead on Arrival

by Patricia Hall

  “I was in the area visiting old friends and wanted to look up Steve Wesley,” he said with a cheerfulness he did not feel. “We were at Paddington Green together before I went north. I don’t suppose he’s in on a Sunday night, but if he lives locally…?”

  “There’s a few people up in CID as it happens,” the sergeant said, evidently not much interested in his visitor. “I’ll call up for you.” Mower sat on the edge of one of the plastic chairs facing the desk unsure whether he wanted the sergeant to succeed in his inquiries or not. When the uniformed officer nodded at him and told him Wesley was on his way he knew that deep down he did not. But he was committed now and when the cadaverous grey-suited figure came through the door towards him he stood up and met Wesley’s outstretched hand with his own.

  “What the hell are you doing in this neck of the woods, Kevin,” the detective inspector asked, his voice friendly enough but his eyes touched with suspicion and his grip as cold and bony as a crustacean. “You’re not back with the Met, are you?”

  “Not likely,” Mower said. “Just down here for the weekend visiting friends. But someone told me you were over here now, and I thought I’d look in on the off-chance. Didn’t really expect you to be here so late…”

  “We’ve got a murder on,” Wesley said shortly. “Black lad. You know how effing sensitive that is these days. You can have dead white kids piled up in the gutter but if anyone lays a finger on one of our bloody ethnic minorities the commissioner’s breathing down your neck before the post-mortem’s over.”

  “Black on black, is it, then?” Mower asked, recognising the Wesley he had known three years before but still shocked by the bile which welled from the man. “Bit of a family feud?”

  “No such luck,” Wesley said. “This one’s down as a race attack, no problem. I’ve got an effing reporter as an eye-witness. Got off the same train as the victim and saw him fall foul of some of the local bovver boys. She comes from somewhere up north too. Where was it you took off to after your bit of trouble? Yorkshire, was it? Do you know Bradfield at all?”

  Mower shrugged easily.

  “Not my patch,” he said.

  “What happened to that bit of stuff you were chasing round Paddington Green, anyway? What was her name? Denise?”

  “Her old man made it pretty clear: she stayed and I went or I’d find myself on a disciplinary. Love them and leave them’s my motto. So what’s the odds?” Mower said.

  “Yes, well, you always did push your luck, as I remember,” Wesley said. “But the guv’nor’s trophy wife? Jesus! You’d have been better off if you’d tried it on with the first Mrs. Davies. He might have given you premium points to take her off his hands.”

  “Wouldn’t have been nearly so much fun, though, would it?”

  “Like screwing a tub of lard, I should think,” Wesley said, with real malice in his tone. Mower wondered what the first Mrs. Davies had done to him. Rejected his advances, perhaps.

  “Get a lot of trouble with the ethnics, do you?” Mower asked, changing the subject quickly. “We’ve been having a bit of bother with illegals on my patch. We know they’re getting in, but we’re buggered if we know how.”

  “The country’s like a bloody sieve since all this EU nonsense,” Wesley said. “They’re pouring in. It’s funny you should ask, though, because I was told by a reliable source that this Somali youth who bought it was an illegal. But it turned out he was kosher after all. Here with his mother, so-called asylum-seekers.”

  Mower swallowed down his distaste, as he had done so many times before in the interests of a quiet life. One of the compensations of the move north was that working for Michael Thackeray did not demand this sort of dissembling.

  “You got anyone lined up for it, then?” he asked. “To keep the commissioner happy?”

  “Oh, I know who did it,” Wesley said. “Don’t you worry, I know about it when one of our little local Nazis so much as farts. The difficulty is making it stick, isn’t it? At least that’s what I tell the CPS, to keep them quiet.”

  “So you won’t be getting a result?”

  “I’ll get a result,” Wesley said. “I’ll charge the toe-rag our observant little reporter eye-balled, eventually, even though he has been useful in the past. I’ll have to move on him this time. A good kicking’s one thing. Murder’s a bit over the top. But I don’t reckon it’ll stick on the evidence we’ll get. It may never get to court. Though I hope it does, if only to keep the Yard and the anti-racist do-gooders off my back.”

  “Bad career move to get on the wrong side of that lot these days,” Mower said.“So what’s holding you up?”

  “Just a whisper I got from another source. The word is that this wasn’t just a random attack. The skins were definitely out to get an illegal, and if that’s right, they must have been after the second lad, the one who got away. And if there’s one of them out there, chances are there’s a whole lorry load we could usefully round up. What I really want to do before I charge any of the bovver boys is find out just how they knew who they were looking for - and if there’s any more information of that kind where that came from. See what I mean?”

  “Killing two birds,” Mower said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go quite as far as that,” Wesley said with a grin which split his face like the slash of a sword. “But I wouldn’t mind putting a few more of the bastards back on a plane with their fat lips taped up if the opportunity arose. And get one over on immigration at the same time. Know what I mean?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Mower said, hoping that his fury did not show in his eyes. “If you get a smell of lorries heading for the north, let me know. You got time for a drink then?”

  Wesley shook his head, to Mower’s relief.

  “Got to get back, old son,” he said. “Good to see you though. And if you come across this smart-arsed little reporter up there in Yorkshire, Ackroyd’s the name, give her one for me, will you? Flaming red-head. They’re always the worst. She needs a good seeing to.”

  Mower crossed the road to the embankment, standing for a moment with his hands gripping the top of the unyielding stone wall, trying to control the nausea which had seized him as he had walked down the police station steps. He was conscious of Steve Wesley’s cold eyes watching him go from the swing doors above. Gradually his breathing slowed and his brain slipped back into gear and he knew that he liked what he had just heard even less in retrospect than when Wesley had let his prejudices all hang out.

  “God help London if there’s many like him still around,” he thought as he watched the tide shove a tangle of driftwood and garbage against the stone defences below him. He knew that if Wesley was so open in his contempt for a large part of the community he served, his views were tolerated if not shared by those in charge at Deadman’s Quay. It was a thought which depressed him infinitely and meant that Osman Barre’s killer might well walk free.

  In his early years as a young London copper he had begun to wonder if he was the odd man out. A well-developed instinct for self-preservation, bred on the streets of south London, made him keep his head down. He knew that his dislike of the casual racism which had swilled around the canteens and interview rooms of so many nicks came not from some superior morality but from simple everyday familiarity and guessed that only familiarity would wash away the poison which swilled around him in the end.

  As his own mother had barricaded herself into an increasingly intense round of seances and laying on of hands he had turned for comfort as a small boy to her friend Rani, a tall and voluptuous Indian neighbour from high in the tower block where he had been brought up. Auntie Rani had included the skinny white boy in her large noisy family when his mother found herself so absorbed by another world that she closed her eyes to his. Auntie Rani had wiped his tears on the corner of her sari, fed him exotic morsels from her table and scolded him in that curious Indian-Welsh accent which he would always associate with home.

  Rani had made him colour blind. He had loved her with a smal
l boy’s uncomplicated passion and her death when he was in his teens, struck down by a heart attack in the street, had left him devastated. It was when he came back to London and generally avoided the chore of visiting his own mother, still wrapped up in her quest for voices from another world, that he realised how much he still missed her.

  He stared down into the swirling water, his mind a jumble of uncomfortable memories. There had been other bodies which had turned his stomach, although never so treacherously as the first. They had been black and brown as well as white, floating, bloated and discoloured, in the river’s fierce waters. As he watched the tide streaming by now, dark and turbulent, he remembered them all, and recalled that while he had treated them all with the same respect, deserving of the same clumsy attempts at justice that the city offered, there were many of his colleagues who had lost that infinitesimal edge of urgency when a case had involved a victim who not was unequivocally white.

  Suddenly, as the light caught the tumbling wake of a barge battling up river against the tide, he saw a vivid image of Laura, half submerged in the murky water, her red hair swirling in the current like Ophelia’s, and he felt afraid. She had already, he knew, seen things which people had rather she had not seen. It was obvious that she intended to go on asking questions which people would rather she did not ask. And she could expect no help from the police who should protect her. But he could think of no words which would deter her or persuade her home.

  “Bloody woman,” he muttered as he started the car, swung onto the main road and pointed the bonnet in the direction of the M1 and the town he was reluctantly beginning to think of as home.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Is he sure?” superintendent Jack Longley asked angrily. “Is he one hundred and ten per cent sure?”

  DCI Michael Thackeray looked at his boss with some puzzlement. He could see no reason why Longley should doubt that Amos Atherton’s post-mortem findings on the body of Imran Hussain should be any more suspect than usual. Nor any reason why Longley should still be regarding him personally with such obvious disfavour, given that he had made an effort to smarten himself up this bright Monday morning, in spite of the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach which had hardly diminished after another sleepless night. Perhaps, he thought bitterly, his credit with Longley had run out at last, which might be no more than he deserved.

  “One hundred and ten per cent sure,” Thackeray said firmly. “His preliminary conclusion was that Hussain was hit over the head and died from the head injury. There was heavy bleeding from the head wound, his clothing was soaked.”

  “Hit over the head? I thought you said the windscreen was smashed? Wasn’t that what he hit his head on? That’s what I told his brother yesterday.”

  “That’s the odd thing,” Thackeray said, aware that as the investigating officer he should by now have interviewed Imran Hussain’s brother himself, in spite of Longley’s reluctance to let him do so. “The preliminary examination of the car doesn’t add up either. The windscreen had been hit from the outside of the vehicle with considerable force, apparently. In other words it wasn’t Hussain’s head that did the damage, so by inference it’s unlikely to have been the windscreen which injured him.”

  “You mean the car hit something - or some-one? An accident?” Longley appeared to seize on that explanation gratefully.

  “Could have been, initially at least, though where’s the victim?” Thackeray asked. “Did he pick himself up off the road and then murder the driver of the car that hit him? Because murder’s what Amos is telling us. There’s no doubt about that. Once he’d cleaned the body up and examined it closely he found the actual cause of death. A single bullet to the heart, entering just below the ribs. Death would have been instantaneous, Amos says. Which makes it even more odd. He seems to have received the head wound first, which bled heavily. There are traces in the car, on the footpath and on the ground where he was found.”

  “What’s he saying, then? He was clubbed on the head, then shot some time later? And some distance away? Dragged off and bloody executed?” Longley’s tone was still incredulous, his blue eyes startled.

  “There was a gap,” Thackeray said. “The head wound was bleeding for some time. The shot finished him off. After that the bleeding would stop.”

  “In some-one’s bloody back garden?”

  “He was almost certainly hurt inside the car - initially at least. There was blood on the seat and the floor. We haven’t got the results back from the lab yet but it’s a reasonable assumption that the blood is Hussain’s. So we’re left wondering if Hussain let his assailant into the car, and if so, why. Was it someone he’d collided with further up the road? Or was there a passenger with him before the windscreen got smashed and the car damaged. If the blood in the car doesn’t match Hussain’s, then we’ve got another mystery on our hands - two people hurt, one dead and one disappeared. The assailant, maybe, in which case we’ve got useful DNA evidence. But Hussain still had money and credit cards on him, so if the motive was robbery the robber panicked and ran off empty-handed. And who the hell was up Aysgarth Lane with a gun last night?” Thackeray’s head spun as he tried to tease out the possibilities opened up by the forensic evidence. He hoped he did not look as dazed as he felt. Bradfield had its share of serious crime but unlike some of the bigger cities shootings were mercifully rare and the new laws on gun ownership would, he had hoped, make them rarer still.

  “So how did he end up in Mrs. Whatsits back garden?” Longley asked.

  “He could have walked or he could have been dragged or carried. As I say, there are traces of blood on the route, according to the forensic team. But no indication of a heavy weight being dragged across the pavement and up the side of the house.”

  “Does Amos think he could have walked?” Longley asked sceptically. “With head injuries pouring blood?”

  “Amos reckons that he could have survived the bang on the head if he’d got to hospital,” Thackeray said bleakly. “He could certainly have been conscious for a while, and could have staggered around without quite knowing where he was.” It was a terrible way to die, he thought, within sight and sound of help but insulated from it by those thick suburban curtains and the darkness of the night, injured and dazed and then finished off with clinical dispatch.

  “But someone made sure he didn’t?”

  “A single shot. Small calibre, Amos says, but he hasn’t recovered the bullet so I’ve got people still searching the entire area.” Thackeray said.

  “So what next?” Longley asked. “This is a right beggar, Michael. The Asian community’s prickly enough as it is. And Sayed Hussain is doing his nut. He’s due to be mayor next year. If this isn’t cleared up quickly it could wreck his political ambitions.”

  “That’s nothing I can do much about,” Thackeray said sharply.

  “You know what I mean,” Longley mumbled. “Race relations are a bloody minefield in this town. So what lines are you following?”

  “We need to know whether anyone was in the car with him, or whether he was on his own and stopped for some reason,” Thackeray said. “Traffic and forensic are onto all that. And then we need to know where he’d been and where he was going.”

  Thackeray was repeating an analysis which he hoped Longley assumed was his own, although the points were no more than sergeant Mower had raised when Thackeray had arrived at the office. His own analytical skills felt rusted up and almost impossible to kick into action this morning.

  “Murdered,” Longley said gloomily. “And I was trying to get him into my bloody golf club, dammit.”

  Thackeray raised a mental eye-brow, but even in a state of exhaustion which made coherent thought difficult he knew better than to comment. He felt far too fragile to get into a row with Longley.

  “So, do we set up an incident room, sir?” Thackeray asked, anxious to get back to his own office and seek out more caffeine for his tired brain. “Perhaps you could fill me in on everything you know about Hussain later.�
� Longley’s lips tightened at that.

  “When’s his wife due back?” he asked. “I need to pay my respects. Not part of the investigation, of course.” Thackeray nodded uneasily.

  “Kevin Mower said that she was being driven back this morning by her brother. It was his house she was staying at in London for a few days with the sons.”

  “He did a decent job there, did he? Mower?”

  “I think so,” Thackeray said. “I’ve not had much time to debrief him yet.”

  “Ask him to see me, will you?” Longley said. “Right away. And for God’s sake, Michael, handle this one with care or we’ll have more bloody riots on our hands, especially if it turns out he was attacked by some little white toe-rag from up Wuthering. The chief constable’ll be breathing down my neck too, you can bet your career on that.”

  Longley hesitated, drumming his fingers on the desk, and Thackeray waited to be dismissed. He disliked Longley’s personal involvement in this case more than he dared admit to himself.

  “You still look like death warmed up,” Longley said eventually. “Can you cope with this lot?”

  Thackeray smiled thinly. He knew that an admission of weakness now would be fatal.

  “Of course, sir,” he said flatly. “No problem.” He had, he thought, had a lot of practice at lying lately and was getting too skilled at it for his own comfort.

  Kevin Mower was waiting for his opportunity. The night drive back to Yorkshire up a temptingly quiet motorway had clarified his mind. He had decided that whatever the risks he had to tell Thackeray that he had seen Laura and that he was worried about her safety. It was not a decision he had taken entirely in Laura’s own interests. If she got into real difficulties and Thackeray found out that he had met her and not mentioned it, his own life would not be worth living.

  The problem now was to find the opportunity for a quiet word as CID launched a politically sensitive murder investigation around him. The main office was already buzzing with activity when he got in at nine and he had little enough time to catch up on events and brief Thackeray before he went to see the superintendent. Mower’s next task was to put in train the routine house-to-house inquiries and search for eye-witnesses to whatever might have happened to Imran Hussain the previous Saturday night, or anyone who might have heard the sound of the fatal shot.